It's taken less than a month to feel the ground give way and experience a yawning deficit in Maslow’s hierarchy.
Strange how life does this.
The universe isn't bothered about evenly distributing problems in a way that would make them more easily manageable.
No. It fucks you over good and proper with alacrity.
Which is what's happened, with a sequence of personal events which I'm sure I'll laugh about one day.
Some were foreseen. Such as finding my professional writing services replaced by cheap artificially generated copy designed for no one but Google to read.
Others weren't. The 'people' ones. Both close and peripheral. These are, of course, the worst of 'les emmerdements'. The ones we don't go into on our blogs.
Because there always has to be some shit-laced icing on the cake, there have to be some bolts from the blue too. Such as an energy behemoth deciding I owe them a ridiculous sum for electricity that I cannot possibly have used.
And someone causing several hundred euros of damage clipping my car after veering into my lane, then of course not stopping to exchange details. Welcome to France.
All of this to account for the lack of a Rarely Certain over the past two weeks. Writing requires emotional energy and all of mine has been invested in the business of figuring out what the fuck I'm doing.
Despite feeling obliged to provide more value than a self-pitying update, all you'd get would be something forced out. A piece for the sake of publishing something. And if there's one thing you can say about the regular readers of this blog it's that they're too intelligent not to spot that.
Ideas have been coming, but failing to gel. So you'll just have to bear with me.
Well, this is awkward …
Maybe I’ll prise my head from up my ass when Rarely Certain hits 1,000 subs.
I like your honesty Mike. Hope things improve for you......
Oh how I sympathise! I've been waiting a while for a hip replacement with increasing pain and incapacity. Then diagnosed with hyperparathyroidism, which may well necessitate having my "throat cut" to remove most of the parathyroid glands, which operation may well get in the way of the hip operation. Each operation should definitely make me feel better but in the meantime each condition is physically depressing and exhausting. Not to mention getting older and not being able to paint because of the pain. Nor finding the energy to read articles (even limited ones) from favourite writers like you! I assume we - and other fellow sufferers - will recuperate and find joy again on the horizon! In the meantime I wish you very well.